Tackling gendered LEGOs with two ads--spaced 33 years apart

Hey iGirl campers! With Camp iGirl about a week away I wanted to make a post directed towards the Project Redesigners among you, as well as anyone else interested in advertising. Depending on the circles you're in online you may have seen this image pop up on your dashboard or newsfeed in the past couple months:

These are two photos of the same person--her name is Rachel Giordano and in the photo on the left Giordano was a four-year-old little girl who posed smiling proudly with the creation she made in a LEGO ad in 1981. Over the course of the past few decades LEGO has gone from largely gender-neutral sets, kits, and colors to making some toys that specifically target girls and others that specifically target boys. In the photo to the right, Giordano sits with a LEGO Friends kit that's targeted to appeal to girls. The vehicle is a news van kit with a beauty parlor on the inside--something that Giordano took issue with, stating that, "it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package." She also spoke about her love of LEGOs as the little girl on the left, and how whatever she built created a message and that, "in 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.” You can read the rest of the interview over at Women You Should Know.

A quick trip down the toy aisles at a local Walmart, Target or Toys R Us will show how toys are separated by which ones advertisers think boys will want to play with and which ones girls will want to play with. This is called gendered advertising--separating products by the gender they're supposed to appeal to. Do the advertisers always get it right? Absolutely not! Is it okay to still like and want to play with pink princesses and stereotypically "girly" things? Absolutely yes!

The message that Giordano and others not in favor of gendered toys and advertising want to get across is that this is not the only way to play and that it's okay and encouraged to play with toys that aren't the "correct" colors or characters. It's play--you can't go wrong!

Have you ever experienced someone telling you that you can't play with something because it's "for boys" or "not for girls?" Let us know in the comments!

Til next time...
Ashley